LEDs will slash energy use for lighting by 95%

Efficient LED lights are appearing more and more in homes, businesses and industry. Today, LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) use about 85% less electricity than a conventional lighting source such as an incandescent bulb. They may soon use even less.

This is a significant reduction. Around 19% of the world’s electricity demand is used for lighting; compared to just 3% goes to smelting aluminium – although in Australia we only use about 12% of our electricity for lighting and 8% for smelting aluminium.

A simple (but not perfect) measure for lighting efficiency is the number of lumens (a measure of light intensity) a lighting source produces per watt.

A conventional incandescent bulb gets 13 lumens per watt to light your room, while a replacement LED bulb from Philips that can be bought at Coles or Woolworths achieves 80 lumens per watt (a compact fluorescent globe gets about 60 lumens per watt – see technical note at the end)